Knowledge

Most organisations have already made a significant investment in data warehousing but now face the challenge of modernising in order to incorporate new data sources or analytic capabilities. While the benefits of turning to data in order to make more informed business decisions are well understood, businesses still encounter obstacles. These most commonly include the perception of a high cost, lack of skills or internal resource, and poor data.

One way of overcoming these barriers is by extending the data warehouse into the cloud. This gives organisations a low cost, fast and powerful environment for running complex analytics and empowers individuals to think creatively and innovatively about how data can aid the decision making process.

IBM dashDB is a fast, fully managed, cloud data warehouse that leverages integrated analytics to deliver answers as fast as you can think. Specifically designed to increase performance of analytical workloads, dashDB’s unique built-in analytics consume and crunch large amounts of data for analytical and reporting purposes. As a cloud solution, you pay for what you use. Combined with the fact that there is no requirement for infrastructure provisioning, or in-house database administration, dashDB provides business users with the ideal environment to start small and experiment with analytic projects and can scale when ready to large enterprise class solutions. Examples include:

Bringing weather data into demand forecasting, to plan more efficiently for customers’ needs and reduce stock outs and mark downs

Accurately predicting the biggest driver of store performance, in order to make more informed decisions about where to place investment

Understanding which customers are most likely to churn and what action can be taken to stop them

Examining the impact of staff turnover and applying predictive analytics to HR data in order to forecast those most likely to leave

Segmenting customers based on buying behaviours and external data, targeting them more effectively and reducing wasted marketing effort

If you are planning to embark on a project similar to any of the above but are struggling with how to start, please contact us today. With dashDB, a data warehouse can be provisioned within hours and we can concentrate on demonstrating real value to the business.